Sunday, October 14, 2012

We've been making this recipe since we first saw it on 30 Minute Meals when my husband and I were in college. It's quick, easy, tasty, and great as leftovers. And fun to make together. We can also get it prepped, cooked, and ready to eat, including clean up in 30 minutes! (Most "30 Minute Meals" seem to actually always take longer than 30 minutes for me if i'm cooking solo). Link to the Food Network site and recipe is here, I've also copied it below. We have not ever put arugula in the soup as the directions indicate, primarily because we couldn't get arugula at the grocery stores in Tuscaloosa, Alabama 10 years ago, back when we first started making this dish. Now for some reason it feels strange to start doing it, even though we can readily find arugula.

Happy cooking!

bell peppers from our garden! still going strong

veggies sliced, don't need to chop small

Browning the meats. We cook the Italian sausage in a separate pan first, then drain off fat, then add to pot with the remainder of the meats

Directions

Place a soup pot or deep sided skillet on the stove top and preheat to medium high heat. Add olive oil, 2 turns of the pan and the sausage. Brown and crumble the sausage, drain off excess fat if necessary then add the ham and pepperoni. Cook meats together 2 minutes then add peppers and onions and cook 2 or 3 minutes more. Add diced tomatoes and season with salt and pepper. Add chicken stock and bring stoup to a boil. Stir in pasta and cook for 8 minutes. Make croutons while pasta cooks.

In a large skillet heat about 1/4 cup of olive oil, 4 turns of the pan over medium heat. Add garlic and cook 1 minute. Add bread to garlic oil, toss and toast the cubes 5 or 6 minutes. Season the toasty cubes with red pepper flakes, oregano and lots of grated cheese.

Stir arugula into soup just before you serve it up. Ladle up the stoup and float several toasty garlic bread cubes in each bowl.

Sunday, October 7, 2012

Fall temperatures have come to the Deep South. Well, at least for today and tomorrow. Tonight we were inspired to make a nice warm soup, one we've made a handful of times and will continue to make again and again. I actually posted the recipe almost 2 years ago in my early stages of this blog, but didn't take any photos of the soup. See this link for the full recipe, recipe courtesy of Food and Wine magazine.

This soup is very easy to prepare despite the long list of ingredients. First thing we did was cook two large chicken breasts. We did this versus using the meat from a rotisserie chicken. Definitely to save time you can buy a pre-cooked chicken then just pull the meat off and cut in to chunks. You can do this while you wait for the liquids to come to a boil. While the chicken cooked, we prepped the remainder of the ingredients except the herbs. Also, after the chicken started to cook, we started cooking the rice. I used a rice cooker so we could put it off to the side and not have another pot on the stove.

The main cooking in this dish is the ginger (lots of ginger!) and garlic, then bringing the liquids to a boil. The shrimp, herbs, lime juice, and chicken all go back in near the end, so it all cooks very quickly. The prep takes longer than the cooking!

You can vary the heat by leaving the seeds in or taking them out of the pepper. We don't have Thai chili's nearby, so we subbed in serrano.

Enjoy!

I only needed two of these limes to get the 2 Tbsp needed for the recipe

Sky while we were cooking. I ran outside to take this =)

Liquids and honey

Good stuff is happening in that pot

Herbs, we didn't have quite enough basil left on our plant, so used some mint as well